Halliburton, Richard. The Royal Road to Romance. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1925.
Reason read: Halliburton was born in January. Read The Royal Road to Romance in his honor.
The Royal Road to Romance opens with Halliburton’s Princeton days when the mere scent of apple blossoms could distract him from his studies. Indeed, he had an adventurous spirit from a very young age and was a self-proclaimed “horizon chaser.” Later he calls himself the “devil’s pet protégé”, unable to resist the call of the road.
Halliburton was a reckless adventurer. He yielded to illegal temptations all the time. He told a stranger he was “in quest of the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow” (p 102). For some reason he and his roommate wanted to climb the Matterhorn so badly that they were willing to lie about their mountaineering experience and hide their lack of equipment. They traveled without an itinerary; going where the fancy took them. Halliburton made impetuous decisions – jumping off a train somewhere in Switzerland because he couldn’t get a sense of the countryside by rail, breaking into the gardens of the Generalife by scaling a wall protected by thorny rose bushes, or using lies to get where he anywhere needed to go. He told one farmer he was a horse doctor so that he could acquire a donkey. After he was arrested he told a guard he was a train robber and bigamist and then stole a copy of the Short History of Gibraltar as a souvenir of his penal adventure.
Other adventures include climbing the pyramids at night, swimming naked in the Nile, trekking to the city of Ladakh where only twelve white visitors are allowed each year (because he wants to see a town that practices polyandry) and climbing Mount Fuji in the offseason, just to say he did.
As an aside, Halliburton got me to look up the painting of Lady Recamier and the champagne, Paul Roget.
Lines I loved, “How many successes are plunged into failure by not letting well enough alone?” (p 87), “…we deliberately set about finding some way to circumvent our restrictions” (p 237), and “A common tongue is not vital to understanding when there is congeniality of spirit” (p 317).
Playlist: I only noticed Beethoven mention.
Book trivia: The Royal Road to Romance was dedicated to Halliburton’s Princeton roommates.
Author fact: It is my personal opinion that some of Halliburton’s escapades were greatly exaggerated. The attack of pirates and subsequent murders on the high seas was hard enough to swallow, but Halliburton’s reaction to it seem implausible.
Nancy said: Pearl said Halliburton’s books are a bit dated.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the interesting chapter called “Where in the World Do These Books Belong?” (p 258).
~*LunaSea*~ 